The Cab Horse

Painted around 1895 and held at the National Gallery of Art, this street scene featuring a horse-drawn cab belongs to Bonnard's early engagement with the animated public life of Paris. Cab horses and their vehicles were a persistent presence in the 1890s Parisian street; they would vanish with motorisation within two decades. Bonnard, like Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas, found in the horse and carriage subject a vehicle for capturing the characteristic rhythms of late nineteenth-century urban movement. The intimate scale and casual observation of the work connect it to his graphic art of the same period — Bonnard was producing lithographed posters that required exactly this kind of vivid pictorial shorthand.

The horse and cab are rendered with graphic economy — strong silhouette and abbreviated detail. The wet street reflects light in the Impressionist manner. The palette is tonally muted, with occasional warm accents suggesting artificial or filtered daylight.